1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a testing (measuring) circuit design apparatus for a multi-terminal device, and particularly to a testing circuit design apparatus which is suitably used for design of a testing circuit for testing (measuring) characteristics of a multi-terminal device such as a semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) or the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
Measurement (or testing) of characteristics of a device having many terminals (hereinafter referred to as "multi-terminal device") such as an integrated circuit (IC) has been carried out using an exclusive tester. However, the characteristic and the specification of the tester are not unified among manufacturers, and thus are different. Therefore, for the testing of the characteristics of an IC, a peripheral circuit (hereinafter referred to as "device board") which is suitable for the characteristics and the specification of an employed tester is designed beforehand, and the device board thus designed is disposed between the tester and the IC to carry out the testing of the IC characteristics.
In order to connect a tester and a device board for the testing when the device board is designed, an engineer who specializes in the design of device boards (hereinafter referred to as "test engineer") has conventionally adopted a connecting method that a point of the device board under testing (hereinafter referred to as "point under test") and a tester resource (resource) are connected to each other on the basis of the specification of an employed tester so that all testing (measurement) items are satisfied.
However, such a circuit design requires a special technical knowledge, and also requires a large number of steps for a process. Further, a produced circuit has an individual manufacturer's personal character, and thus those circuits which have been produced by different manufacturers have no unification in wiring rules. Accordingly, maintenance of the circuits produced cannot be performed well. In addition, the test engineer does not necessarily perform the most rational connection between the tester and the device boards. Accordingly, this connection method has the problem that there occurs a case where some tester sources are not effectively used in accordance with the connection manner.
Furthermore, the test engineer conventionally designs an IC testing circuit on the basis of the specification for an IC which is written by an IC designer. Accordingly, the test engineer is required to be familiar with the specification and the characteristics of an individual tester to be used, but it takes a long time to satisfy this requirement. In addition, the number of test engineers is now being reduced, that is, a human resource is now lacking, so that a large number of novel IC designs which increases year by year have not been treated at present.